The Progress of Man from Advanced Commentary to Sophomoric Opinion

December 04, 2007

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately. Time and tide, as they say.

So I thought I'd post a few pics here, while I wrap up some writing projects that I've been working on. I recall promising someone a pic of my home altar, which isn't super-impressive or anything, and I can't recall who wanted to see it. But here it is:

Just in case you're wondering, the red scroll is more concerned with the Chinese reading of that character (patience) than the Japanese reading (ninja).

Here's a closer shot of what's on the altar:

The central image is carved from some kind of deep red wood, but I don't know which. I bought it in the back of a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant here in Houston.

On the left of the central image is a smaller, gray stone image of the Buddha from Indonesia, and on the right is a lighter-colored (I don't know the material) Quan Yin, which I bought at Fo Guang Shan.

Also, you can see Compassionate Water, blessed on the temple altar at Chung Mei Temple (one is for my teacher, Rev. Hong, while the other is for a child), live bamboo, water, a money offering (I thought it was cool to offer Chinese money, for some reason), a tea light we found at Target (for Renegade Buddha - LOL), and Richard Gere's Tibetan prayer flags (for Buddhist Jihad). The smaller images are of Damo (Bodhidharma) and a smaller Quan Yin that I picked up somewhere. The incense is Shoyeido and the ash is the Japanese incense ash. The water offering cup has the Heart Sutra on it, which I thought was really cool.

OK, so here's the newest addition to the Tengu House family: Freddy the Ninja!

We named him Freddy because he's almost as fond of his claws as Freddy Kruger, and the ninja part came about because he's a natural stalker. He's always attacking something. He just appeared at the temple one day, as if dumped there. After three weeks, Sifu asked me to give him a home, which of course I was happy to do.

October 24, 2007

Interesting article in the current issue of Tricycle Magazine. At question is the ability of American Buddhism to thrive in the future, given its lack of roots in the American family structure. The author, Clark Strand, laments that American Buddhists aren’t passing Buddhism on to their children in the same way that American Jews and Christians do with their respective faiths, and asserts that we’re going to have to change all that if we’re to have a reasonable expectation of its future survival.

I have to wonder, though: Is it really our intent to simply pass on the Dharma to our children, as they do in many traditionally Buddhist countries? Wouldn’t we rather they find the Dharma for themselves, when they’re old enough to go looking for it? Personally, I was thirty-three years old before I was mature enough to be able to assume the mantle of convert, with all that it entails.

One of the best attributes of American Buddhism, in my opinion, is that it’s marked with greater enthusiasm, in many cases, than say, Japanese Buddhism. What I mean is this: American Buddhists, right now in their first or second generation, tend to be more serious about the faith in general, than many of their Asian counterparts. I think that among American lay Buddhists, the percentage of vegetarians is higher than it is among Asian lay Buddhists, for example. And I believe I know why.

Someone who receives his faith from his parents and his society, as was the case with almost all the Christians I’ve ever known, will accept that faith and generally stick with it. Most folks around here are Christians because their parents were Christians, and their parents before them, and so on. No examining of the faith is necessary. No deep study. Most folks around here claim to have read the Bible from cover to cover, but have in fact received no religious education, nor performed any faith-oriented research on their own, beyond the Sunday-school classes they were forced to attend as children.

But someone who discovers a totally different faith, examines it, takes classes in it, seeks out a competent teacher and really learns it, and then accepts and declares it as his own, stands a better chance of actually living according to its teachings. This is the convert, and it’s through this method that most American Buddhists found the Dharma.

And this is how I want my children to find it. It will be entirely up to them, to come to the Dharma if and when they want to. But if they, when they’re ready to begin looking at such things, would rather keep the religious mores that have been placed upon them by virtually everyone around them, well that will be good too. I don’t preach the Dharma – I don’t understand it well enough for that, and I wouldn’t if I did. I’d rather folks find it for themselves, the way the first few generations of American Buddhists, including the Boomer Buddhists, did.

October 22, 2007

Okay, all you Heaven Dogs. I’m working on some new material about my experiences during the Short Term Monastic Retreat this past July. But my writing time has been limited lately, so here’s an older post from the original version of Tengu House to keep your Bodhi Mind occupied in the interim. It ain’t necessarily Dharma, but it does explain what’s going on in Scruff’s little tiny brain from time to time.

The Same Piece of Water

Part I

Sitting

So I’m sitting in front of the Buddha image, with a plain white candle and Japanese incense burning, having watered the bamboo and refilled the offering cup and rearranged my soft cushions.

Baseball. I have the unquestionable truth of the Dharma before me, and I’m thinking about sports.

So I breathe. Nothing else. Thoughts about baseball end with a sudden echo – I can actually hear a thought end mid-stream – and I breathe. My eyes are almost closed, but not quite. I no longer concern myself with whether my mouth or eyes are open or closed when I meditate. They just do what they want anyway.

No thoughts. No mind. Not searching for anything. No wisdom and no gain. Even the words it takes to describe the experience are absent during it. Perfectly free non-thinking. No gain and thus the bodhisattva lives prajna paramita…

BAM! I suddenly understand what the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh means by “interdependent co-arising.” This is one of the pillars of Buddhist thought – I wasn’t even thinking about it, but there it is, all of a sudden, rigth there in the front of my understanding.

Nothing exists by itself. We already knew that, of course, because of the great teachers, like venerable master Hsing Yun. But I can see, sitting here on my cushion, that the universe – all things, all conditions – are like the water in a bowl. No one part exists without the others, but also no one part of the water can move independently. If you disturb the bowl, does any one part of the water remain still while the rest moves about? Or does it all move in conjunction with the rest of it? There is no distinction between one part of the water and all the others. It’s all just one. Just water. To quote the venerable John Daido Loori Roshi, this is “Intimacy. No separation.”

Just Another Material Possession

The Buddha image, of course, is not the Buddha. When we put our palms together or prostrate ourselves before the Buddha image, we’re symbolically bowing to the Buddha nature within ourselves. The image exists to remind us of the Buddha nature, and was carved out of wood somewhere on the other side of the world, by a person who hadn’t been able to properly feed his family for some time, until he took the job of carver, making that serene expression I see on the Buddha’s face.

Again, no duality. No separation.

He and I are the same piece of water in the same bowl, and I move by staring at the face that he moved by creating.I imagine that the man lives in a part of mainland China where clean water is rare, but satellite television is common. His children bathe in the river and have been sick for some time. But his brother helps by selling the Buddha statues he carves, and sometimes he gets a big order from a relative in Vancouver. Most go to California – the statues are popular in Chinese restaurants along Grant Street in Chinatown.

(More likely, my Buddha image was made by a Benghali immigrant working under sweatshop conditions in a machine shop in Manila. I doubt that any part of this carving was done by hand. But that's not the point.)

This is no separation. This is interdependent co-arising. Not only is my Buddha image – my purchased product, my material possession – linked to this man, but my very existence, my very life, is linked to him. I would not exist without either him or the combination of factors that led to his existence.

The same piece of water.

Part II

The Buddha Image

I bought the Buddha image at a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant in Houston, back when I was setting up my home altar. I’d just returned from Iraq, and I needed a suitable central image to surround with the elements: a candle for fire, a plant for earth, an offering cup filled with water, and an incense bowl filled with ash for the purpose of holding an incense stick in place to represent the element of air. I’d done my research and I knew what type of image I wanted. I even had a good idea of what kind of wood it should be fashioned from (lighter or darker, smooth or a little rougher, polished or rustic-looking, etc). I had the image in mind, and I knew what I was looking for – until I went to this restaurant. The place was full of statues from Chinese history – Damo (Bodhidarma), Quan Yin (the bodhisattva Kannon), General Kwan, the Dharma Protectors. Some of the statues were resin, but most were of hand-carved wood, especially the smaller ones. I asked about a Buddha image and was led into a sort of alcove that served almost as a back room, wherein I was shown a showcase containing literally hundreds of different images, ranging in size from about four inches to about eight feet tall. One particular six-foot image of a thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva looked as though it had been taken from a temple somewhere in either China or Tibet, and would have been right at home in any modern Fo Guang Shan temple. The image that I chose was made of a light-colored wood, which I called “blonde,” for lack of any specific ability to identify it. What do I know about different types of wood? Was it birch? No, I don’t think so. Maybe pine? Yeah, maybe. But really, it didn’t make any difference, because that wasn’t the image I ended up with. The point here is that, after all my research, mulling-it-over and decisions, I still became connected to some particular man in (I imagine) China, by buying his Buddha carving, even though it wasn’t what I was looking for at first. But of course, I was connected to him long, long before I ever dreamed of finding an image of the Buddha for my altar.

Part III

Consciousness

All consciousness is connected in the same way as water in the same bowl. If left to evaporate, where does the water go? It goes into the air, to gather in the atmosphere and eventually return to the earth as rain.

As water.

So even the water in the bowl is impermanent, in its own way, and will not respond to your efforts to hold on to it. It’s like a dollar bill, because you can be assured that you will see it again – but you cannot mark it, like you can with a dollar bill, and then recognize it again later. You can color the water in the bowl with blue food coloring, but it will still evaporate and leave the blue color by itself in the bowl.

Consciousness is like this. Life is like this. We are also like this. Even when someone dies, we know that we will see them again, even if we don’t recognize them.

Once the water evaporates, and then eventually falls back to earth as rain, what happens to it? It will eventually be gathered again, in a different bowl. The bowl may be the ocean, or it may be a culvert or a rain gutter. But the water will be gathered, will be collected, and will repeat the cycle.

Connecting It All Together

Now, remember the bowl that we talked about in part I. Let’s say that by now, the water from our original bowl has evaporated, and has rained back to earth. Let’s say that the bowl held one liter of water, all of which has completed its cycle and is now once again part of the earth’s water supply. Can we see exactly where that particular water is? Of course not. But we can know that the water from the bowl is now water in several different places. And after the water has gone through several million such cycles, where is our water from our original bowl?

After that many cycles, it is everywhere. It is in every bowl, every ocean, and every puddle on earth.

In this way we can easily see how all water is connected, and how no water can exist without the existence of all the other water in the world. The same is true of all life, all consciousness. This is interdependent co-arising, the “existing together” nature of all things.

And the same is true of people. I have become connected with the man who carved this Buddha image that I have on my altar, but this was really only a re-connecting, a re-co-arising. I have never met him, and yet he and I were interdependent a hundred million lives ago.

And this connection that can be made, re-made, revealed, realized and explained through this story of the Buddha's image, happens again and again with everything that happens. Every time any person does anything at all, from lying down to sleep, to fighting in a war, to reading a single word from a book, that person becomes in yet another way connected to yet another hundred or thousand people. In buying that image when and where I did, I became connected to the man who created it, to his children who are sick, and to his brother who sold it for him. But also I became connected to the shipping rep at the import / export company in Shanghai, and the crew of the vessel that ferried it across the Pacific to Vancouver, as well as the restaurateur who ordered it and had it shipped to Houston, so that it might sit in his back-room alcove until I happened to wander in and buy it.

There were many, many people involved in the creation of this object and its subsequent transport to my altar. But there were many more people involved in the creation of those people (parents, grandparents, etc), the existence of their jobs, their widely varying reasons for doing what they do, and for being where they were at that moment.

And we are all the same piece of water, in the same bowl.

Part IV

Relevenace – What All This Means

So what relevance does the water analogy have to us, here in the real world? How do we translate this to our daily lives?

We translate the analogy by reading it with an eye toward transposing ourselves into the story. We translate it by living it.

When all the water was in the original bowl in the story, that was us. That was you, reading this, and me, writing it. That was my grandmother and your uncle, the young woman who made my latte this morning and the guy sitting in the car next to you in traffic. We were all in that bowl – but that was many, many lifetimes ago. So when we see a monk sweeping the steps at the Fo Guang Shan temple, or a bus driver ferrying workers across town in Kuwait City, we can know that they were once all in the same bowl.

When the Buddha sat in the deer forest at Issipatana, he was surrounded by his closest disciples, many of whom were very young. Once, two of them were angry at each other and were not speaking. The Buddha saw this and told them all a story about a deer, a turtle and a magpie. In the story, a deer was caught in a hunter’s trap, and it took a magpie to distract the approaching hunter and a turtle to pry the trap open with its powerful jaws, to free the deer.

When the Buddha finished telling the story, he asked, “Now, who among you bhikshus was that deer?”

Some raised their hands.

“And who was the magpie?”

Others raised their hands.

“And who was the turtle?”

Still others raised their hands.

The Buddha saw this and said, “Bhikshus, many of you identified with the deer, who was saved by the teamwork of the others, while many of you identified with the brave magpie or the strong turtle. But all of you raised your hand, identifying with one animal or the other.

“Bhikshus, if each of you was one of these animals, and each of these animals was once many of you, then either you knew each other long ago, or you were each other long ago. Either way, how can you now be angry with each other?”

Conclusion

Each of us is connected in ways we cannot see, or even in some cases understand. But we are truly all parts of the same whole, and we have common, shared experiences. We’ve known each other before, and have been each other before, as each of us has lived hundreds, thousands, or even millions of lives.

We’ve all been the same piece of water for a long, long time. What we do to others we are, in reality, doing to ourselves.

And in this way we can see one of the ways in which the law of karma, or causality, works. If I were to drop blue color into a bowl of water, it would dye all the water in the bowl, not just one part. For me to strike another living creature with my hand, is the same as one of my hands striking the other. What we do to other living creatures we also do to ourselves.

We must live in accordance with the Dharma, thus creating a wholesome and positive life for ourselves, thereby benefiting all creatures. We must follow the Noble Eightfold Path, thereby creating Right Living for ourselves and for all creatures. If all the water is one piece, then dirty water in one place means dirty water everywhere – and we have the ability to keep clean, to live cleanly.

And in this way we can see how the interdependence of all things makes the Noble Eightfold Path so important. We must practice these steps in order to bestow them upon all other living creatures, all the water:

This interdependence is also what makes the five poisons what they are. When one poisons oneself, instead of following the Noble Eightfold Path, one affects all creatures. To practice these poisons is to impose them upon countless generations of all living things:

attachment or desireaversion, anger, or aggressionignorance or delusionpride or arroganceenvy or covetousness

It's only after we begin to accept that we're all connected in this way, that we can truly begin to understand the importance of living the Path and avoiding the Poisons. We begin to see the importance of the Dharma itself, and we begin to realize our true potential under its refuge.